Microsoft duo launch MakeOfficeBetter.com

Most of us have probably used applications from the Microsoft Office suite at some point in our computing lives and it’s likely you wished for new features or existing features to be improved in those apps. You can contact Microsoft and request those features or changes, but you have no guarantee Microsoft will ever read your idea, let alone take it onboard.

If you are a regular user of Office apps then the desire for things to change is going to be much higher and you are more likely to submit requests for changes, or at least complain about them. Now you have another outlet in which to make your requests heard in the form of the website MakeOfficeBetter.com; and its run by two Microsoft employees working on the Office and Windows development teams.

This isn’t an official Microsoft site and that’s clearly stated by the two guys running it, Steve Zaske and Luke Foust, they even have a warning at the bottom of the front page which states:

Although we are employed by Microsoft, this is not an official Microsoft website. You should not expect an official response from Microsoft by posting an idea here, but we’ll do our best to get the ideas posted here in front of the right people within the Office development team.

The website allows you to describe changes or additions for each of the Office applications and then other users can click if they like the idea adding a following for it. Those ideas are then ranked by how many people like them giving a clear list of the top features Microsoft should be concentrating on. Users may also comment as to why they like the ideas or reasons why they should be implemented.

Really this is something Microsoft should have thought to do itself, or at least embraced the idea of its employees and made it official. There’s nothing like building a community around a product to help improve it. MakeOfficeBetter.com is basically an active tesbed of users Microsoft are getting access to for free.

The use of the voting system will ensure that the top ideas and improvements float to the top of the pile and the need to register to vote will help keep it a realistic list. And it already seems to be popular with the top ideas getting hundreds of votes. That will surely become thousands of votes within a couple of weeks.

If Zaske and Foust nurture this site then it will become invaluable to Microsoft and no doubt it will become official. If that happens Microsoft will have no option but to listen to its large community for users, especially with Office 2010 due next year and growing competition in this area.